Film Carew

8 February 2013 | 9:41 am | Anthony Carew

America's most iconic President comes to life - again, and a Juliette Binoche-led feminist film that's a real reflection on today's society.

Until I saw Dawson's Creek, it never occurred to me that Steven Spielberg would be anyone's favourite filmmaker, let alone a young person's. And, by a young person's, I, of course, mean a 20-something young person playing a fictional much-younger-person even though he had a receding hairline (and maybe this is not the right point to parenthetically type such, but: this long-held viewpoint that Dawson's Creek started out great and went downhill is off the mark; you can keep James Van Der Beek and Katie Holmes tediously mooning in the eternal nostalgia small-town America, give me Busy Philipps and Michelle Williams as duelling neurotic college roomies in the contemporary metropolis). Citing Spielberg as your favourite filmmaker is akin to citing Starbucks as your favourite café; the tireless filmmaker an expansionist populist shilling a corporatised take on thoughtful culture, with enough hints of slight exoticism and prestige to dupe consumers into believing they're participating in cultural change, rather than cultural oppression. If this all sounds very dramatic: Señor Spielbergo's filmography amounts to an unadjusted global box office of $9 billion and counting. Unless you're a 1%er executive whose very-large-and-luxurious house is the direct result of Steven Spielberg's filmmaking, anointing him as your favourite filmmaker shows not careerist ambition, but a complete lack of inspiration.

Spielberg operates with a broad, vulgar kind of 'duality' that is best summed up by his 1993, which found the release of both Jurassic Park and Schindler's List. With the former, he made a piece of theme-park crowdpleaserism whose stars were its computer-generated effects; in the other, he put on his Serious Artist hat and let us know how Serious he was by shooting in black-and-white, his film viewed as some noble artistic crusade when it was a mercenary money-maker like any other. Spielberg is such a tireless worker that these moments of grouped-together releasing can happen often; and, most of the time, the narrative just skews towards these easy-to-consume notions of the popcorn movie and the prestige movie, with critical cues are taken from there. But Jurassic Park: The Lost World is, in its smirking genre play, actually superior to the haughty, repellently awful Amistad; War Of The Worlds is actually a thrilling explosion of light and movement whereas Munich is a morally-questionable portrait of period revenge etched in the belligerence of W. Bush America; and The Adventures Of Tintin may be an essentially-unnecessary computer-animated adaptation of the eternal comic series, but it sure beats War Horse, a piece of maudlin equine porn in which a magical, mystical beast arouses erections in everyone it meets (the film being the thematic and moral antithesis to the superficially-similar Au Hasard Balthazar, which means that it's in opposition to, y'know, one of the greatest motion-pictures ever authored).

That Spielberg's latest picture, Lincoln, has been nominated for 12 Academy Awards should be, in theory, at least some sign of his greatness. But, really, it's another sure sign he's just a canny businessman; able to work the Oscar's hideous orgy of corporate largesse with a prestige-picture custom-built for awards-shows. It's a very long, meticulously-appointed, fabulously-acted portrait of an important historical figure from a distant era. And it's that very Oscar-baity set-up that bumps up so many of those nominations: art direction, wardrobe, and cinematography all taking their cue from the mid-19th-century setting, drawing on the production's vast financial reserves, and then going to town with authentic-to-the-era set dressing, costumes, and light. In a simple cinematic way, Lincoln is really nice to look at: DOP Janusz Kaminski using the era's eternal low-light-conditions - all grey Virginia skies, oil-burning lamps, and tenuous candlelight - to make a dark film deep with rich blacks, looming shadows, and soft edges. With its pleasing look, its magnetic star turn from Daniel Day Lewis, and its thoughtful, conversational, detail-rich script, it's not surprising that Lincoln has earned critical acclaim.

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But in the face of its vast financial success and its consensus Oscar favouritism, the question begs: why this film? Why has this particular portrait of America's most famous - and most favourite - President resonated so much 150 years removed from its time? It may sound strange, but it's likely because the film shows politics at work. Films about arcane political process don't exactly scream crowdpleasin', but this history lesson in genuine political change feels like a glorious fantasy in this day-and-age. The film takes an issue that no contemporary viewer would deny - the abolition of slavery - and passes it through the political process; watches it get shouted down, trampled on, run through the wringer of politicking; watches learned, thoughtful men railing against the basic human right of freedom. It seems incomprehensible to watch slavery up for debate, and, yet, our genial-yet-determined hero must fight tooth-and-nail to get his bill passed. This is, of course, all potently symbolic for 21st-century America, where an increasingly divisive and vindictive political process holds citizens hostage; keeping the status quo of oligarchical corporate rule in place as politicians fight tooth-and-nail against their opposition, even when the matter at hand may be something simple as human decency, environmental responsibility, or civic duty. The 'good guys' in the picture are the Republican Party, but they're almost unrecognisable in their distant antiquity; meaning that this is history as wide-open fable, a fantasy of actual meaningful political change that can hearten, sadden, inspire, or disappoint - however you wish to take its tale - contemporary viewers of any ideological stripe. Yet, the most poignant reading comes in the recent tabling of firearms restrictions in America; the comparison between those clinging to slaves and those clinging to handguns an easy one; the connection between this history lesson and the contemporary climate an easy one to make; viewers invariably yearning for some Lincoln-esque, of-the-people figure to arise in the here-and-now.

There's a great scene in Elles in which Juliette Binoche - playing a French reporter from Elle magazine, interviewing a pair of university students about their choice to work as 'high-class' prostitutes - sits down with Anaïs Demoustier in a park; the interviewer equal parts maternally protective, smirkingly condescending, and genuinely envious of her young charge (this is, if it needs to be said, a great skill of Binoche's, being able to portray conflicting emotions without theatrical gesture; and, indeed, a great performance by Binoche, herein). “I feel like you can still smell it on me,” Demoustier laments, and you - and Binoche - are sure she's talking about the semen and sweat, the cling of clammy hands and cheap aftershave that's soaked into her skin. Except that she's talking about the smell of flatbox furniture, plastic-covered couches, polyester clothes, and cheap carpeting; the odour - or, indeed, the eau de - of an upbringing in a council apartment tower in far suburbia. As escort, she projects an air of elegance and affluence; as university student, she discusses Flaubert and Proust; but Demoustier is terrified the world - and Binoche - can see through these façades; that the smell of where-she-came-from cannot be cleansed; that her lower-class upbringing is a prison that she has left behind, but can never escape.

Like any fervent film follower and/or nerdy cineaste, I'm prone to 'collecting' these random moments that stick with you; and this scene in Elles was one of my favourites from 2012 (a list which I actually haven't really been keeping, but which would surely start with that amazing moment in Oslo, August 31st in which Anders Danielsen Lie eavesdrops on the two girls writing out lists of goals for their lives, with their naïveté and idealism hanging heavy with irony in the face of his complete, disengaged resignation from life). Partly, this is because it touches on a thought that can be discussed entirely free from the film; this idea that no matter how far you go or what you do, you will always be, in some ways, no more than where you came from, than whom you descended from; a terrifying thought that, weirdly, can be presented with a kind of folksy jolliness (as in, say, the Reese Witherspoon rom-com Sweet Home Alabama, which played to me like an unimaginable nightmare). But mostly it's how the scene works within the film; the way it doubles back on expectations, presents conflicting emotions, and adds layers of thematic and characterised depth symbolising a film that, whilst flawed, is a deep philosophical study of subject-matter long ago reduced to cliché.

Co-written by Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska and Danish psychotherapist Tine Byrckel, Elles is a determinedly feminist film that can't get past its own internal conflict on the subject, and is all the better for it. In a piece of artful writing and even better editing, Szumowska skips scattershot through a series of faux-flashbacks; the film initially suggesting it takes place in a narrative 'now', yet invariably revealing itself to be tied to no straight chronological line. The vague plot, if you need one, goes: Binoche is on deadline, writing an article about the two young girls - Demoustier and Joanna Kulig - that she's interviewed about their paying-my-way-through-school sideline in cautious, exclusive prostitution. Her family are almost comic props staged in support of a brazen rebellion against the patriarchy: her two boys lacking ambition, distracted by video-games, constantly leaving their shit around for mum to clean up; her husband Louis-Do de Lencquesaing in that smarmy, sneering, insufferably-arrogant prick mode he wheeled out in the mind-alteringly awful Polisse. From there, Binoche retreats into sharp memories and vivid fantasies; a non-clichéd depiction of the sexually-awakened housewife, her blood brought to pumping by Demoustier and Kulig's manifold tales of getting paid for fucking.

It's a determinedly feminist film, but there's no simple reading to the central thematic thrust that rises up with the rubbing-your-nose-in-it didacticism of Michael Haneke (and, with opening and closing shots that border on homage to Cache, Haneke is certainly a better comparable figure for Szumowska than Krzysztof Kieslowski, whom she has been compared to due to their shared Polishness; all filmmakers having, across each comparison, Juliette Binoche in common). And that provocative central theme is: that, in a hyper-capitalist world, all women are whores; or, moreso, that that's all society views them as, allows them to be; that their only real currency is their cunt, be it used to squeeze out human infants and/or be rented by neutered married men with disposable cash. Szumowska and Byrckel create a thoughtful narrative journey that begins with judgment inbuilt, peels such judgment away, and then allows the uneasiness of their prostituted reality to just sit there and fester, in a way that's both quietly tragic and absurdly funny. Theirs is a feminist film, but sex work is neither viewed with intellectualist dismissal or misjudged designs on 'empowerment'; with both professional lives - uni-student-turned-discrete-escort, part-time-mother-and-part-time-journalist - being both sources of power and shame, liberation and degradation. Completing the theme, Elles eventually renders Binoche's life of bourgeois privilege and well-heeled domesticity as its own kind of prostitution; she, too, having been paid for and possessed by a man's wealth. Even when she attempts escape - and dabbles on the sexual 'dark' side with suitably embarrassing results - she ends up back in the same place, tied to the same pimp; with rebellions, transgressions, or mercenary usings of the status quo all doing nothing, at all, to disrupt it. Elles isn't a film out to change society, but reflect it; and, true to such, Szumowska settles on an uneasy ending that settles no scores nor achieves any resolution; not closing discussion, but inviting it.